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Unless a patient’s life was on the line, the answer for Republican anti-abortion-rights leaders was a firm no. Every year, when the Hyde Amendment came up for reconsideration, a fight began about whether it should have additional exceptions. In 1976, Congress passed the Hyde Amendment, a rider to an appropriations bill for the Department of Health and Human Services that banned Medicaid reimbursement for abortion unless a person’s life would be endangered if they carried a pregnancy to term. Support for lifesaving exceptions went without saying.Ĭracks in the consensus on exceptions showed early, however. But every Republican president supported an exception for rape and incest. As a rite of passage, Republican candidates had to declare their positions on abortion exceptions.
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Starting in 1980, the GOP platform included support for the long-term fantasy of the anti-abortion-rights movement: a constitutional amendment banning abortion nationwide. Exceptions to abortion bans, they worried, would be the exception that swallows the rule.ĭebate about abortion-ban exceptions temporarily receded after the Supreme Court recognized a right to choose abortion. What was to stop someone from lying about sexual assault? asked anti-abortion-rights commentators. The same was true of abortions in cases of rape. In the eyes of these Catholic activists and their allies, most of these reasons were bogus. In the 1960s, many seeking abortion had claimed to be suicidal, leading to a wave of abortions justified on the basis of mental health. Opposition came from an anti-abortion-rights movement with strong ties to the Catholic Church-and largely, in Congress and state legislatures, from a subset of Catholic politicians.įor them, the fear was that women would take advantage of the already narrow exceptions. These bills enjoyed bipartisan support Republicans including Ronald Reagan and future Vice President Spiro Agnew signed them into law. Many of the early bills were patterned on a proposal from the American Law Institute, a group of elite lawyers, judges, and academics, allowing abortion in cases of rape, incest, health threats, and serious fetal conditions. The roots of current conflicts about emergency exceptions to abortion bans go back to the 1960s, when states began introducing modest reforms to criminal abortion laws. These dual suspicions have produced a new definition of abortion-as the intentional, criminal taking of a life-and a growing consensus that abortion bans should have no exceptions. Even though activists of the anti-abortion-rights movement and the politicians who support them sometimes argued that women must be protected in certain cases, they question the honesty of people-both doctors and patients-who invoke emergency exceptions. Why has what was once unthinkable suddenly become a legal reality, despite its extreme unpopularity? Recent changes in both the GOP and the anti-abortion-rights movement have something to do with it, but the problem runs deeper: a twin skepticism of women and the medical establishment. Powerful groups like Students for Life, Feminists for Life, and the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) argue that “ abortion is never medically necessary” and that doctors should always be punished for intentionally taking a fetal life. Conservative states are rushing to eliminate or narrow existing exceptions to their laws. Republican candidates like Matthew DePerno, the Republican running to be Michigan’s attorney general, oppose all exceptions to abortion bans, and that includes to save a mother’s life. The Idaho GOP just approved a platform with no lifesaving exception. Anti-abortion-rights groups, like Pro-Life Wisconsin, have described the “life of the mother” exception as unnecessary and wrong. Support for the so-called life-of-the-mother exception seemed unshakable.įrom the May 2022 issue: The abortion underground Even if someone believes that a fetus enjoys the same rights as an adult, abortion could be justified much in the same way that people who are anti-violence can understand the need in certain situations for self-defense. Life-of-the-patient exceptions do not even require anti-abortion-rights Americans to change their minds about fetal personhood. Only 8 percent of respondents favored no exception whatsoever to criminal abortion laws. These exceptions enjoy sweeping public support a recent Pew Research Center poll found that 73 percent of Americans favored legal abortion if a woman’s life or health was at risk. When Americans used to imagine life post- Roe, many seemed to believe that at the very least the country would agree on one thing: the need for an exception to save a woman’s life.